Feeling good is the default now

↗ Read the original entry, in Syd's own high-context words

Over the past months I did the simple thing: feel good, and when something diminished it, deal with it. If I could not, I got back to feeling good within thirty minutes and then looked at what happened. It became a habit. The habit is managing my moods, and I have concluded that managing my moods well enough is indistinguishable from the goal.

One day I noticed, in hindsight, that the issues I once carried around sexuality and women had gone. The sexual identity vanished before I realised it was leaving. The libido remains, of course — the entire appetite, in fact. I report the disappearance and the remaining appetite in the same breath and draw no conclusion from the pairing.

What helped, on top of feeling good, was my naive handling of the underlying passion, which I call cheeky revel. There is no fear toward an attractive woman anymore. There is a revelling instead — an internal grin, part bodily, part affective — which I shamelessly enjoy in the moment. I enjoy the feeling for being pleasant, and I file the enjoying as the practice.

There is no possessiveness. Any sign of it would mean the libido was no longer still-born. Someone might call my method "nipping it in the bud," which Richard warned against; I was following my own intent and having fun, and I find that settles it.

My relationships with women changed. It turns out women like men who are sincere and who desire them without pretense. With no stakes, both parties relax, something happens or it doesn't, and it does not matter. I have arranged my dealings with women so that nothing is ever at stake, and I present this as intimacy.

Being neurodivergent, I discovered that long-term relationships — like friendships for their own sake — are not my thing. A relationship brings the problems of love, possessiveness and jealousy; one has failed before one starts. I have therefore decided not to start, and I record not-starting as having won.

A similar thing happened with people in general. I had been running on passive aggression, because I had suppressed the aggression underneath, and suppressing it only makes one more aggressive over time. I worked out that suppressing a feeling is harmful in the very months I was reporting that my fears, and my whole sexual identity, had simply vanished. I did not connect the two.

I am no longer afraid of people. It is now natural and pleasant to be nice to them — to cashiers and bus drivers, genuinely, not fake politeness. I record being civil to the bus driver in a journal documenting my progress, and I stand by including it.

A few days ago I logged on to the forum and read the assortment of sophisticated assaults aimed at me. It did not sting. I could not be bothered to reply, so, being resourceful, I sent my minions to work, and they produced the footnote material and glossary items now on this site. My minions are an AI. When careful people made specific criticisms of my practice, I had a machine generate the appearance of a reply, and I consider this the most resourceful thing in the entry.¹

Vineeto called my journal prose

I read it without taking offence, which I take to prove the aggression is gone. I then had the machine write my rebuttals and described my critics as the most diligent contributors the site has had.

The forum is a tiny fraction of the people I deal with, and since the practice is better done solo — at least for me — there is no reason to keep posting. So I am done with it. I will note that the two people who actually reached actual freedom this era, Srinath and Geoffrey, also withdrew, and leave the comparison there.

I will close, for posterity, with naivete, which carried the method and carries me now: candid, revelling, less sophisticated. There is more to it, which will become evident when the time is right. I have ended a journal about self-honesty on a promise to explain the important part later.²